I know this is a little late as there are only a few days left in April, but in order to reduce storage at FBA, Amazon is having a special promotion where
you can recall inventory for free during the month of April. Here is the announcement:

Free removal of your FBA inventory until April 30, 2016

You may have slow-moving or low-selling inventory. Starting March 31, 2016, FBA is waiving fees for any removal order for return or disposal of your
inventory that is currently in U.S. fulfillment centers.
Learn more
(You have to be logged into Seller Central to use that link)

Interesting concept: There is a service called
MyRealKarma.com that has been operating
successfully in the UK for several years and has now moved into the US Market. Here is what it does:

eBay, Amazonand Etsy storefronts do not show up in Google search.

Here's how they solve it...

For every user they create a Seller Profile, which contains all of their customer feedback, social media accounts, friendly sellers etc. Users can display
their Seller Profile on any website to build trust and sell more.

Also a Seller Profile is a full blown web page that is searchable by the Major Search engines. This can drive targeted high value traffic to users online
stores and build web presence using their Seller Profile. Best of all,
MyRealKarma.com is completely Free,
not a trial or freemium.

So if you also sell from a website, I suggest you take a look at their service and give it a try.

One of the articles below is about getting approved to sell in restricted categories. But there are also several dozen restricted product brand names you
cannot sell on Amazon. A lot of folks who don't know this, and are practicing Retail Arbitrage, make the mistake of buying these products and when they get
home and try and list them, they learn they are not allowed to sell them.

Worst of all, Amazon does not publish the list - you don't learn you can't sell an item until you try and list it. However, I have been able to assemble a
pretty good list of many of the restricted products. It's not 100% perfect, so if you have come across a restricted product that is not on my list, Please
Click here
to contact us and let us know and we will add it to the list.

Jungle Scout has just published an interesting post on Keyword Research. Here is the information:

One of the things that makes me most happy is to analyze data to make informed decisions. The maverick business person who operates on impulse and
intuition is outdated...and foolish!

If you can quantify your decisions with good data, why would you not? I have based my Amazon FBA business around gathering the most important information
to do product research. But once you have chosen your product, you can still use data to maximize your likelihood of success...

That strategy is called Keyword Research. We have just put together an in-depth run down of how you can do keyword research to optimize your listing for
the most important, and profitable, customer searches on Amazon.

Wondering where to buy UPC codes for your Amazon listings? I use
Nationwide Bar Codes
as they sell GS1 certified bar codes.

UK Amazon Sellers - A while ago I featured an article that listed ship and prep centers in the US and UK. Since then I have discovered a new one in the UK
- FBA Prep & Ship.
Best of all they are offereing a 25% discount to my readers. So when you sign up, use the
Contact Us form on the website to let them know you came from my newsletter and you will get the discount.

Winning the buy box means you have to come up well in search when an Amazon buyer types search terms into the search box. How well you do your SEO (Search
Engine Optimization) on Amazon will determine how high you come up and allow customers to find your products.

The first thing you need to remember is on February 2, 2016 Amazon announced changes to its list of prohibited seller activities The new policies prohibit any attempts to manipulate
the search and browse experience on Amazon.

So what we are not going to discuss is cheating the system, but rather, how to legitimately maximize your SEO results, or what SEO experts
call "White hat" techniques (as opposed to "Black hat" techniques designed to cheat your way to the top).

Amazon uses a search algorithm to serve up results when a customer types keywords or product names into the search box on Amazon. The exact specifications
of that algorithm are secret, but some have leaked out and are well understood in the industry.

Here are some of the things we know the algorithm looks for (not necessarily in order of importance - that I don't know).

Recent amount and quantity of sales
- We know this one is important, as Amazon wants to feature items that sell quickly. So poor performing products (those with low search history or
poor conversions) will not come up well in search. (I will discuss solutions to this below)

Your Seller Account Metrics
- Given two sellers selling the same item at the same price, Amazon will feature the seller with better account metrics above someone with poor
metrics. Say someone searches a term like "cuff bracelet." There are a lot of sellers who sell some type of cuff bracelet. Amazon will tend to list
the sellers with excellent account metrics above sellers with poor metrics.

FBA versus Merchant Fulfilled
- All other things being close to equal, Amazon tends to list FBA sellers above MF sellers to give their Prime members better results. Also most
Prime members hit the Prime Only button when they search. When they do this, if your items are MF they will not come up at all in
search.

Lowest Price
- We know that price is one of the most important factors in search results and often determines who wins the buy box when a search does come up.
When a buyer is searching in a specific category, there is even a drop down box where the buyer can search by price (plus shipping).

This is one of the advantages of being in FBA. When Amazon compares pricing, if one seller is MF and the other is FBA, Amazon adds the MF seller's
shipping cost to the price comparison. But, since they assume the FBA buyer will take advantage of free shipping, they add zero to your shipping
price. So if you are at $29.95 + 7.95 shipping ($37.90), then I can be at $37.80 and Amazon will see me (the FBA seller) as the lower price by
10¢.

Content and Keywords
- The very first thing the Amazon search engine does is look for content related to the search. If someone searches for a bracelet, they are not
going to put up results for Lacrosse sticks. So getting the important keywords into your title and keyword field is critical. Don't forget to
include the brand, full name of product, model number, and size (if any).

Besides the title, the keyword field is also critical. I suggest you use a keyword tool such as
Merchantwords that shows you the keywords people type when searching for something
on Amazon. Amazon used to look for keywords in bullets and descriptions too, but they are getting away from this (although its still happening
somewhat). Amazon has publically announced that eventually the only keywords they will search are the title and keyword field. But, this has not
yet been fully implemented in all categories yet.

Recency and number of reviews
- The more reviews and the more recent they are, the better you will come up in search. The reviews need to be within the past year at least. Three
or four reviews that are a couple years old will not help much.

Having said that, be careful of trying to rig the review system, or use third-party services to get reviews. This is one of the prohibited
activities in the new guidelines that can get your account cancelled if they catch you doing it. A better way is just to ask your customers to post
reviews and not offer anything in return. You can do this with a service like Feedback Five or Feedback Genius that automatically sends your
customers an email asking them to post both feedback and a product review (The emails contain clickable links they can click to do that).

So there you have it. Those are the key items the Amazon search engine looks for to bring up search results. Now, how can you improve your chances?

Slow moving products
- If a product is not selling the first thing you want to do is determine if it's a search issue, or a conversion issue. Go into your business
reports and look at the Detail Page Sales and Traffic Report. This shows you a report by ASIN. If you are getting a lot of page views and
low sales, then its probably something wrong with your listing. (Photo, description, bullets, price, etc.) Try revising your listing (or lowering
your price) to see if that solves the problem.

If your page views are low, then it's a search issue, so take a look at your keywords.

My philosophy has always been to lower my price and get rid of slow moving items as I want to free up that cash to put into products that are
selling more quickly. But if you are convinced a product will be successful if found, then think about investing in Amazon's pay-per-click
advertising program (Sponsored products). If that improves your sales history it will almost immediately benefit you in search.

FBA versus MF
- If you are now merchant fulfilling think hard about moving into FBA. We were strictly MF from 2006 to 2010. When we moved into FBA in 2010 our
sales went up by several hundred percent within a matter of a few months. Today we are 100% FBA and we average selling about 30 items a day.

Poor account Metrics
- this all comes down to customer service and how well you run your business. Look at your account metrics report in Seller Central, identify the
areas you are weak in and work on improving them immediately. If your total feedback score is low, then just a couple feedbacks can give you a bad
score. If you are merchant fulfilling, then slow shipments and taking too much time to enter tracking can hurt you. If you don't check and answer
email from Amazon customers quickly, that can harm you. One thing I did notice is that when we moved into FBA, it really helped my account metrics.

Pricing
- I am not one who favors stiff price competition on Amazon. I prefer to use the other methods we have covered above, creating bundles, or private
label products as a way around that. But sometimes you just have no choice. As I said, I like to get rid of slow moving products. One of the
reasons a product may be moving slowly is too much competition - and sellers that constantly lower prices. When I see that my philosophy is to move
on to another product. I am constantly sourcing, so I find it fairly easy to replace poor performing products.

Readers often ask me how I research to find the best products. The honest answer is I do very little research. (I look at the product on Amazon to
see how much competition there is and what the sales ranks are, but that is about it. Mostly I trust my gut and I experiment a lot to find out what
sells.

If you are having problems in search and winning the buy-box, then try these techniques and they will be sure to improve your business.

It is possible to get some of your wholesale suppliers to ship direct to Amazon for you.

Typically, only the smaller companies will do this. Large companies and large distributors have systems in place that make this difficult to do. But, I
have 5 different suppliers - all small companies, where I can communicate direct with the owner who I have trained to do this.

The key to making this work is to give your suppliers highly explicit directions. Here is a recent email I sent to one of my suppliers (in this case the
owner of the company) explaining how to create a shipment:

Hi Andy

You said you were willing to try this, so here is a new order for 24 each of the two piece combo __________ sets.

Here are the steps you need to do - Please read carefully as Amazon is very strict about how this is done.

- I have attached a PDF of the product labels

- You need to print those out and place the label over the UPC code on the package so the UPC is completely covered.

- Amazon does not permit Styrofoam peanuts or shredded paper in their shipments

- Put all 24 in one box

- If there are any bar codes printed on the box please X them out

- If the polybags have an opening greater than 5 inches Amazon requires a suffocation warning label on the poly bag.

- When the shipment is ready, please email me the weight and dimensions of the box. I enter that into my Amazon accounts and Amazon generates a shipping
label. I will then email you the PDF of the shipping label.

- The shipping label comes in two parts. Both parts are used on the box - but one thing Amazon requires is that neither label can cover the slit in the
center of the box that gets cut open when they open the box. So put one label on each side of the box center.

This is so when Amazon opens the box they do not cut through the label.

- Then you just give the box to UPS and Amazon charges me for the shipping.

- IF you want to come up with a small charge to cover your supplies and time, I am OK with that. Most of the vendors who do this for
me charge 25¢ per item.

I know this sounds complicated but its really not, and it doesn't take all that much time.

Product labels attached - I use Avery 5160 labels which come 30 to a sheet. And for the shipping label you need a full size 8.5 x 11 sheet label

If this is too complicated, let me know and we can go back to the old way. But this really saves me shipping cost both to here and to Amazon and that means
if these are more profitable, then I can buy more often.

This email was our first shipment and it went fine. Notice that I offered him 25¢ each for doing this. But he did not charge me for that and did it
for free. Out of the five vendors who ship direct to FBA for me, three of them charge me a fee and the other two don't. Even with paying the fee I save
both money and time. I only pay one shipping charge and it's the lower Amazon shipping concession charge, and my items get to Amazon much sooner so they
sell faster.

I picked the jewelry category (which we sell in) as an example of what you will see on the page. At the end of the page is a button that says "Request
Approval." Hitting that button will take you to the application page. Here is what the Jewelry Restriction page looks like:

Jewelry

Amazon limits the addition of new sellers in the Jewelry category to ensure that customers can buy with confidence from all sellers on Amazon.com.

The requirements for selling in the Jewelry category reflect buyer concern for product quality, product branding, and consumer safety. Adherence to import
and export restrictions is also important to ensuring that buyers can purchase authentic, high-quality Jewelry products.

Sellers must meet the requirements listed below to sell products in the Jewelry category. Please read this list of requirements and consult our Help pages
if you have questions about specific policies. Meeting these requirements does not guarantee that Amazon will approve sellers to sell in Jewelry. Amazon
reserves the right to review the quality of each seller's products and listings, including checking that products and listing data meet all applicable
requirements. Please note that Amazon may remove your selling privileges for failing to meet these requirements.

Listing of items priced over $125K is not allowed in the Jewelry category.

All sellers who apply to sell Fine Jewelry must pay a non-refundable application fee. No fee is required to apply to sell Fashion Jewelry. See the
Fine Jewelry Terms and Conditions for more
information.

Sellers without a Professional selling plan must upgrade to a Professional selling plan once their application is approved.

Seller minimum requirements

Sellers must meet these performance criteria to be eligible to apply to sell in the Jewelry category:

Order-Defect Rate of 1% or less

Cancellation Rate of 2.5% or less

Late Shipment Rate of 4% or less

View your current metrics in the Performance section of your seller account under Account Health.

If your account does not meet the minimum criteria, your application will be rejected
. Please take corrective action and ensure your performance metrics meet the minimum criteria before completing the application.

Product quality requirements

All products must be new. No used products are allowed in the Jewelry category. We do not allow the sale of pre-owned vintage or antique jewelry.

All products must be authentic. We do not allow counterfeit, replica or knock-off products. We respect the intellectual property of others and
require that sellers posting on our site do the same. If you believe that an item offered on our site violates your intellectual property rights,
please submit your complaint using this online form.

Sellers must employ quality control and inspection procedures. All products must be properly stamped with the country of origin and metal type.

All products must be sold as listed and as characterized in the descriptions, images, and specifications shown on the detail page.

Product listing requirements

Sellers must follow Amazon listing standards for any product sold on Amazon.com.

Sellers must have reviewed Seller Central listing guidelines and agree to classify their products appropriately and accurately.

Sellers must submit product titles, bullet points, and product descriptions that are clearly written and help the customer understand the
product.

Sellers are directed to read and understand FTC guidelines for advertising jewelry, as well as
Tips for Listing Fine Jewelry, and list
their items in accordance with this guidance.

Sellers may not match their item listings against existing items in the Jewelry category unless the item is from a major brand. Sellers must create
their own detail pages for all jewelry products that are not from major brands; matching these products to existing items created by other sellers
is not allowed.

Branded jewelry and jewelry accessories must be listed using the manufacturer's UPC code. Sellers of branded merchandise without UPCs can request
UPCs from the brand owner/manufacturer. Learn more about
Adding UPCs, EANs, and ISBNs for Your Products.

Sellers who produce their own branded merchandise may apply for the
Amazon Brand Registry, which provides an exemption from this UPC requirement.

Buyers must be able to complete all aspects of ordering and purchasing a product using only the Amazon website. Customized items that require
buyers to communicate customization information to sellers must use the
Amazon Custom
platform, which allows sellers to offer personalized products.

All listing data and images must be suitable for all ages and appropriate for our global community. Listing data and images may not depict or
contain nudity (including unclothed mannequins) or pornographic, obscene, or
offensive items.

Sellers must follow the
Jewelry Data Requirements published in
Seller Central. These requirements are enforced systematically. Any items not meeting these standards will not be accepted.

For the purposes of product classification, item specifications, and quality assurance, we distinguish between fine and fashion jewelry based on
several criteria. These criteria include, but are not limited to, metal type, gem type, and pearl type. Learn more about
Categorization of Fine vs. Fashion Jewelry Materials.

Data requirements vary by product silhouette and materials. For example, we include different specifications for gold and diamond earrings than we
do for a crystal and steel ring. Our data requirements reflect these differences.

If you would like to apply to sell Jewelry on Amazon.com and if you meet the requirements listed above in the Seller Minimum Requirements section, please
click the Request approval button below. If you plan to sell any items with fine materials, please indicate this on the request and your application will
be processed accordingly.

When you request approval the system will ask you for several things. One of them is a website address where Amazon can look at your items and images.
Remember to check the Amazon Image guidelines to make sure your images comply. As for the website, if you do not have one, an easy way to go is just set up
an eBay Store and list about a dozen items - again making sure to include the Brand name, UPC code and an approved Amazon image for each item. Then just
give Amazon the URL address of your eBay Store.

The other thing Amazon usually asks for, are copies of invoices from real wholesale suppliers (not retail stores). They typically want at least three
separate invoices - each less than 90 days old. The best way to get these is just buy some jewelry from suppliers with low minimum orders and list the
items to sell on eBay until you get approval from Amazon.

So the first thing you have to do is read all the regulations on the restricted category page and build a checklist to make sure you meet all of those.
Then fill out the online application. Don't be surprised if you are denied - I have spoken with sellers who were denied at least 3 or 4 times before they
were accepted.

If you are denied, do not open a support case, just reapply. The bad news is Amazon does not always tell you why you were denied - although sometimes they
do, such as telling you your images were not acceptable or something like that.

One more thing - In addition to categories, Amazon also requires approval to sell specific products. Here is their list

Products Requiring Approval

Even if selling in a category does not require approval from Amazon, selling certain products may require approval:

We stock all forms of American Flags and we sell them wholesale to anyone that wants to buy. We have a full supply of American Flags for Memorial Day, Flag
Day, July 4th Independence Day, 4th of July, Veterans Day & we supply Cemeteries, Graveyards, Realtor's & public municipalities with American flags
and stick flags.

Olympiceyewear is a true importer of sunglasses. They offer attractive prices to retailers and wholesalers. They use higher
quality materials and ensure high level of quality control on all sunglasses we make.

Please Note:
Some of the products and
services mentioned in this website, in articles, banner ads and
newsletters and blog posts are for products and services for which I
earn a referral fee or commission. We always evaluate anything we
recommend very carefully and each year we turn down literally dozens
of opportunities to recommend products or services where we can earn
a commission. Even though we earn a fee on some of our
recommendations, we only recommend products and services that we
feel will deliver good value and with rare exceptions, they all come
with a money back guarantee.